The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust

By Kristen Renwick Monroe

Through moving interviews with five ordinary people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, Kristen Monroe casts new light on a question at the heart of ethics: Why do people risk their lives for strangers and what drives such moral choice? Monroe's analysis points not to traditional explanations--such as religion or reason--but to identity. The rescuers' perceptions of themselves in relation to others made their extraordinary acts spontaneous and left the rescuers no choice but to act. To turn away Jews was, for them, literally unimaginable. In the words of one German Czech rescuer, "The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason."


At the heart of this unusual book are interviews with the rescuers, complex human beings from all parts of the Third Reich and all walks of life: Margot, a wealthy German who saved Jews while in exile in Holland; Otto, a German living in Prague who saved more than 100 Jews and provides surprising information about the plot to kill Hitler; John, a Dutchman on the Gestapo's "Most Wanted List"; Irene, a Polish student who hid eighteen Jews in the home of the German major for whom she was keeping house; and Knud, a Danish wartime policeman who took part in the extraordinary rescue of 85 percent of his country's Jews.


We listen as the rescuers themselves tell the stories of their lives and their efforts to save Jews. Monroe's analysis of these stories draws on philosophy, ethics, and political psychology to suggest why and how identity constrains our choices, both cognitively and ethically. Her work offers a powerful counterpoint to conventional arguments about rational choice and a valuable addition to the literature on ethics and moral psychology. It is a dramatic illumination of the power of identity to shape our most basic political acts, including our treatment of others.


But always Monroe returns us to the rescuers, to their strong voices, reminding us that the Holocaust need not have happened and revealing the minds of the ethically exemplary as they negotiated the moral quicksand that was the Holocaust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781400849574

Kristen Renwick Monroe

Kristen Renwick Monroe is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent books are The Heart of Altruism, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the edited volume, The Economic Approach to Politics.

Book preview

The Hand of Compassion

________________________________

THE HAND OF COMPASSION

_________________________________________________________

Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust

Kristen Renwick Monroe

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2004 by Kristen Renwick Monroe

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press.

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Monroe, Kristen R., 1946–

The hand of compassion : portraits of moral choice during the Holocaust / Kristen Renwick Monroe.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-691-11863-9 (cl : alk. paper)

1. Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Altruism—Social aspects. I. Title.

D804 65.M66 2004

172′.1—dc22     2004044251

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Galliard.

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

THE HAND OF COMPASSION WAS FASTER

THAN THE CALCULUS OF REASON.

—Otto Springer

CONTENTS

_____________________

PREFACE

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv

Stories That Are True

1

CHAPTER ONE

Margot

9

CHAPTER TWO

Otto

55

CHAPTER THREE

John

101

CHAPTER FOUR

Irene

139

CHAPTER FIVE

Knud

165

CHAPTER SIX

The Complexity of the Moral Life and the Power of Identity to Influence Choice

187

CHAPTER SEVEN

How Identity and Perspective Led to Moral Choice

211

CHAPTER EIGHT

What Makes People Help Others: Constructing Moral Theory

239

A Different Way of Seeing Things

257

APPENDIX A

Narratives as Windows on the Minds of Others

267

APPENDIX B

Finding the Rescuers

287

NOTES

291

BIBLIOGRAPHY

331

INDEX

355

PREFACE

_____________________

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT LOSS. It is a book about love. It is a book about normal, human decency transformed into extraordinary courage by a political regime so evil it confounds human comprehension. It returns us to those secret, frightening places in our own souls, places we seldom enter, touching only elliptically, late at night and alone, when a loved one has died or we are forced to face the eternal, when we cannot escape asking who we are, what we live for, and whether there is any sense in a world in which life and love and all we hold dear are so fragile.

This is a book about moral choice during the Holocaust, and it suggests the tremendous power of identity¹ to shape our most basic political acts.² It argues that how we see ourselves in relation to others significantly—even critically—influences our treatment of them by limiting the options we find available, not just morally but cognitively.³

This book grew out of my earlier work on altruism. The Heart of Altruism asked what caused altruism and then discussed the implications of this analysis for social and political theory.⁴ I found the critical impetus for altruism was psychological, a particular cognitive worldview—I called this the altruistic perspective—in which the actor saw himself or herself at one with all humanity. The importance of this worldview as an influence on behavior suggested the value of further research to sharpen understanding of the psychological process by which our sense of ourselves in relation to others both inhibits and shapes political activity.

The present volume addresses this challenge, moving beyond the identification of the altruistic perspective as a general phenomenon and attempting a fuller depiction of this perspective and its role in the moral psychology. It also expands my earlier theoretical analysis by treating altruism as a lens that can shed light onto moral theory.

Traditional moral theory often begins from first principles, making assumptions about the structure of agency and character; theorists then explain what motivates actors and how people’s practical moral deliberations occur without asking whether or not people actually do, or even can, measure up to these standards.⁵ In this book, I take a different tack. I focus on the moral psychology and ask what an empirical examination of moral exemplars can reveal about the impetus behind moral action. In doing so, I am influenced by recent work on the behavioral consequences of cognitive factors, such as memories, schema, and organizing conceptual frameworks.⁶ Research on human cognition remains in the preliminary stages and the challenge for scholars is to find a methodology that links experimental findings from laboratory settings to the more complex political world. I found this link in a freely flowing narrative analysis that permits the listener to decipher how the subject’s perceptions influence behavior.⁷

I thus begin with the assumption that the human articulation of moral ideals is constrained by the basic architecture of the mind, the mind’s development, our core emotions, social psychology, and the limits on human capacity for rational deliberation. To demonstrate how this works in a world far messier and more complex than a laboratory setting,⁸ I analyzed the normative effects of such cognitive factors via in-depth interviews with rescuers of Jews during World War II, individuals whom most of us would find morally commendable—regardless of how we define morality—and whose behavior is not easily explained by the dominant schools of Western philosophy. I then ask what a close examination of rescuers’ stories reveals about the moral psychology and teaches us about moral theory.⁹ What drove these particular individuals? What caused them to engage in their moral acts? And what insight can this empirical examination shed on broader questions of ethics and morality?¹⁰ In answering these questions, the book addresses one of the most basic questions in moral theory—what causes us to do good—but it does so via a close examination of moral exemplars, not through religious or philosophical analysis.

Existing work on altruism and rescuers has moved beyond the level of correlational analyses to focus attention on an altruistic personality or identity.¹¹ The present analysis confirms earlier findings suggesting the tremendous power of identity and perspective to shape our most basic behavior. The impetus for rescuer activities originated not in religion, reason, or any conscious, contractarian, or utilitarian calculus but rather in how rescuers thought about themselves and about others around them.¹² It thus was not the most frequently cited forces driving moral choice that led rescuers to risk their lives to save Jews; it was their sense that we are all human beings. To understand rescuers, we therefore need to ask about their moral psychology, to understand what it was about their identities and, more particularly, their perceptions of themselves in relation to others that worked to constrain and shape the choices they found available, not just morally but empirically. We need to appreciate the ethical consequences of how rescuers classified and categorized people—specific individuals and groups, Jews, bystanders, or Nazis—and where they drew the boundaries of the community of concern.¹³

As I explore what I believe will become one of the new frontiers in social science—our ability to map the human mind and understand the importance of how people think about themselves and about others around them for future behavior—I focus on the manner in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the social and political world. Psychologists call these factors cognitive construals.¹⁴ I pay special attention to the construals associated with the actor’s self-concept, her categorization of others, the extent to which certain values are integrated into her sense of self, the type and pattern of perspective taking, the actor’s sense of efficacy and extensivity, the development of moral salience, and the transformative aspect of altruistic acts for the agent’s identity.

This focus on cognitive construals has several advantages. It adds to our knowledge of the moral psychology and reveals something that is missing in the literature on moral choice. It increases our substantive understanding of the psychological foundations of altruism. It furthers knowledge of the critical self-concepts that lead to humane, moral responses to ethnic differences. And, finally, it advances work on the psychological foundations of moral and political activity.

Basic Argument and Organizational Format. Because of the interest in and the importance of the topic, I have tried to craft a work that is scholarly yet accessible to the intelligent lay reader. To do this, material that buttresses my argument, but which is of a more academic interest, is placed in appendices and notes.¹⁵ The basic text of the book itself has been pared down to provide focus to my essential argument.

What is the basic argument in this volume? Essentially, the stories analyzed here suggest ethical acts emerge not from choice so much as through our sense of who we are, through our identities.

The book opens with a prologue that uses an exchange with one rescuer to address issues of memory and the ethics of interviewing.¹⁶ It then presents the rescuers’ stories. Because understanding rescuers’ moral psychology means interpreting intricate and subtle cognitive differences, I am careful to document these perspectives. I do so through extensive presentation of the raw data, the narrative transcriptions of minimally edited interviews conducted between 1988 and 1999. The heart of the book thus presents a cognitive view of moral choice through the use of autobiographical sketches, told in the speakers’ own words.

Although I interviewed many survivors and rescuers, all certified by Yad Vashem,¹⁷ this book concentrates on the stories of five rescuers. Margot was a wealthy German whose father was head of General Motors for Western Europe. Margot left the Third Reich in protest against Nazi policies, moving to Holland, where she worked to save Jews despite being arrested many times.

Otto was an ethnic German living in Czechoslovakia. Though offered opportunities both to profit from his German status and to sit out the war in India, Otto stayed in Prague, joined the Austrian Resistance movement, and saved over one hundred Jews before ending up in a concentration camp himself.

John was a Dutchman placed on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted List because he organized an escape network to take Jews to safety in Switzerland and Spain. Arrested five times, John was tortured but never revealed any information. He always managed to escape, even when most of his network was betrayed, and took important information to Eisenhower and the Allies in London.

Irene was a Polish nursing student when the war began. After the partition of Poland, Irene was pressed into slave labor. Yet she hid eighteen Jews in the home of a German major, for whom she was keeping house, and helped other Jews hidden in the woods.

Finally, Knud is an inventor who took part in the extraordinary rescue of 85 percent of the Jews in Denmark. Later turned in to the Gestapo for his acts of treason while in the Danish police force, Knud continued his rescue activities while living underground and in hiding.

These five are not the only rescuers I interviewed.¹⁸ I focus on just these few individuals, however, because I found it necessary to construct detailed and close examinations of individuals in order to convey the rich complexity of any individual’s moral psychology. I chose these five because they reflect the wide variety of background characteristics, such as religion, education, and national origin, found in rescuers as a group. Yet each clearly illustrates the critical themes I found in my analysis of all the rescuers: the tremendous power of identity to constrain choice, the complexity of the moral life, and the importance of our perceptions of self for moral motivation. These stories thus fill critical gaps in our understanding of the moral psychology. In particular, their stories suggest that if we can understand how people see the world and themselves in relation to others, if we can decipher their cognitive frameworks, perceptions, and categorization schema, we may begin to determine why identity exerts such a powerful moral influence.

Can a close examination of how these five rescuers thought about moral issues provide insight into the process itself by which identity worked to constrain choice for other rescuers? Can we further assume that rescue behavior during the Holocaust can tell us something of value about how people think about moral issues in general? Can these narratives shed light on other forms of moral political action? About the humane response to ethnic violence and genocide in contexts other than the Holocaust? I believe so, and I invite readers to reflect on rescuers’ motives as they think about these stories for themselves and then focus directly on the puzzle that originally intrigued me: the empirical finding that identity and perspective trump choice. This finding raises many difficult but fascinating and important questions.

What is the moral psychology, and what is the psychological process through which identity and perspective influence moral action? What part of moral action can we explain through reference to our sense of self in relation to others? Can we develop a theory of moral action that relies not on religion or reason but on identity and how we categorize ourselves in relation to others? If so, what are the contours of such a theory? And finally, can an analysis of rescue behavior help us rethink our most basic theories of human political behavior by focusing attention on the extent to which moral choices result from our fundamental sense of what it means to be a human being and how we categorize ourselves in relation to others?

I fear I have more questions than answers.¹⁹ But the empirical analysis presented here does provide compelling evidence that identity and perspective—especially the cognitive construals that shape how we see ourselves in relation to others—both set and delineate the range of choices we find available cognitively. My findings underline both the complexity of the moral life and the need for moral theory to allow more fully for the extent to which moral action works through a sense of self and the need for human connection. It is the power of identity to shape action, and the importance of perspective in drawing forth particular aspects of the complex psychological phenomenon we call identity or character, that is the missing piece in the literature on moral choice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

_____________________

IF YOU ARE VERY LUCKY as a scholar you find yourself involved in a research project that takes you places you never knew existed, exposing you to new ideas and helping you understand the world and human relations in different ways. This happened to me in 1988, as I began what I thought would be a short project on altruism.

My early academic work had been in political economy, focusing on econometric models of political support. Analysis of different theories of voting piqued my interest in how the assumptions underlying the models we utilize shape the substantive conclusions we reach, and I turned to a consideration of different approaches to the study of politics. Two edited volumes¹ traced the development of the behavioral movement within the context of twentieth-century American political science, examined the shift toward rational actor theory in the late 1960s, and provided a critical look at both rational choice theory and its contemporary alternatives. My interest in the debate over rational choice theory has been set in a broader context of how—and whether—we can create an empirically rooted, testable science of politics, and how we should best go about this enterprise.

My work on altruism² suggested that there are clear limitations to theories grounded in the assumption that human nature is innately self-interested. This work had some small influence in causing rational actor theorists to shift their emphasis from self-interest as the heart of the model to a more general concept of rational action as goal-directed behavior.³ Participating in this debate, however, led me to think about the forces at work on any innate human nature. Is there a human nature? If so, how much of this nature emanates from self-interested concerns? How is self-interest related to needs for human connection and a sense of community? How do others, through culture and political systems, shape any innate needs? And how do external stimuli call forth different aspects of the self’s need to flourish? These interests shifted the focus of my work to a consideration of identity and the power of identity to influence political behavior.

I first noticed the importance of identity as an influence on political and moral choice while writing The Heart of Altruism, a narrative analysis of interviews with altruists and entrepreneurs. This analysis suggested that explaining altruism through theoretical frameworks based on self-interest—as economists and evolutionary biologists traditionally do—misses the essence of altruism, which is a particular cognitive worldview in which the altruist feels connected to others through bonds of a common humanity. As part of the research for that book, I interviewed a few people who had rescued Jews during World War II. Like characters in a novel who take on a life of their own, my rescuers stayed with me, inviting me to listen to their stories with a fresh ear, insisting they could teach me not just about altruism but also about broader issues in ethics.

My time with the rescuers forced me to look at a whole range of questions my training as a behavioral social scientist had not encouraged me to think about, questions I came to believe were far more important than many of my initial concerns. It required me to abandon many of the social science concepts and methodologies that had originally charted my own intellectual life. Like a detective following the clues to a mystery, I was forced to inquire about issues far outside my own limited range of expertise and I found myself moving into the domain of the ethicist, the psychologist, even the linguist. In none of these fields was I formally trained and, if I was lucky enough to be constantly learning new things, I fear I also was a great pest to all the people I constantly approached, asking for yet more readings in yet another subject or field. Because of this, my intellectual debts are particularly extensive. Not only must I thank the usual suspects—family, friends, colleagues, and the rescuers themselves—but the myriad scholars who helped me as I scrambled to gain the most rudimentary knowledge in fields that someone far wiser would never have dared to embrace without more extensive formal training.

The rescuers were particularly generous in opening up their lives, and painful memories, to a stranger. Margot Lawson, John Weidner, Otto Springer, and Irene Gut Opdyke are no longer living, but I am most grateful for the time we had together.⁴ Otto was able to help me in editing his extensive transcripts and his daughters and sister-in-law also read his chapter.⁵ One of Margot’s daughters read the final version of the chapter on her mother and one of Margot’s grandsons supplied details on aspects of the family left vague by Margot herself. Knud Dyby is—happily—still alive and has seen and approved of the final transcript.⁶ Knud and Margot gave permission to publish parts of their own writings, and Irene generously let me relate one story—concerning an anti-Semitic priest—that initially was told to me off the record. Photographs were provided by the rescuers or their family members. The photograph of Irene speaking to my class came from a tape of her talk. The Weidner Foundation, through Naomi Weidner, gave permission to reprint photographs currently in its possession. To continue this tradition, I will be turning over my edited transcripts to the Holocaust museums in Detroit, Washington, and Los Angeles. I am happy to make the full transcripts available to any other museum, institute, or scholar concerned with them.⁷

I have benefited in incalculable ways from my participation in a wonderfully welcoming professional society, the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). My debt to the members of the ISPP, to the members of the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on Political Psychology, to students and faculty in the UCI Program in Political Psychology, and to my colleagues at UCI’s Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality cannot be overstated. For their general conversation as well as their generosity in reading all or parts of this manuscript, special thanks must go to Dani Bar-Tal, Augusto Blasi, the late Murray Edelman, Eva Fogelman, Doris Graber, Ken Hoover, Leonie Huddy, Ned Lebow, Gerda Lederer, Robert Keller, Catarina Kinnvall, Milton Lodge, Elizabeth Mitchell, Stanley Renshon, Janusz Reykowski, Shawn Rosenberg, David Sears, Roberta Sigel, Suzanna Smolenska, Ervin Staub, and David Winter. I am grateful to Kathleen McGraw and the other members of the Summer Institute Program in Political Psychology, run jointly by the ISPP and Ohio State University, and to the contributors to Political Psychology (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), who did much to educate the grateful editor.

Many political theorists and philosophers were kind enough to correct errors and point me in various directions as I tried to learn about ethics. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Joseph Cropsey, Russell Hardin, Jennifer Hochschild, Martha Nussbaum, Laura Scalia, Joanna Scott, and Marion Smiley are chief among them. My time as a Laurence Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values provided critical input at an early stage in my work, and Fred Alford, Jim Glass, and Gaalen Erickson introduced me to work that helped me understand the moral significance of cognitive categorization.

As always, my students taught me far more than I taught them. To Jack Craypo, Connie Epperson, Randy Firestone, Lina Kreidie, Matthew Levy, Kristen Maher, Kay Mathiesen, Saba Oyzurt, Molly Patterson, Ted Wrigley, and Martin Young I owe special debts.

I am exquisitely fortunate in having David Easton, Helen Ingram, Cecelia Lynch, Mark Petracca, and Etel Solingen as colleagues. Each of these dear friends has read my work and commented on innumerable drafts of my manuscripts. Others who provided helpful comments include Barbara Dosher, Wil Lampros, Robert Lane, Frank Lynch, Gertrude Monroe, T.W.G. P’Minter, Fay Robison, and Susanne Rudolph. For their help in preparing the final manuscript, I am indebted to Edna Mejia, Kristin Fyfe, Jenn Backer, and the superb staff at Princeton University Press. I am particularly grateful to Chuck Myers for his patience, editorial judgment, and gentle sense of calm.

While working on this project I have received generous financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation, and the University of California’s Institute on Global Peace and Conflict Studies. Parts of this book have appeared in articles in the American Journal of Political Science, the Annual Review of Political Science, and the International Political Science Review.⁸ In a few instances, I have quoted passages from rescuers’ transcripts that also appeared in The Heart of Altruism (1996). I am grateful to Princeton University Press and to the journals cited above for their permission to reprint sections of my work that previously appeared in their volumes. I also am indebted to my coauthors for their permission to draw on our joint work: Kay Mathiesen and Jack Craypo (on moral psychology and virtue ethics), Molly Patterson (on narrative), and James Hankin, Lina Kreidie, Saba Ozyurt, and Renee VanVechten (on identity). Ute Klingemann and Michael Barton worked with me on the original interviews with rescuers. None of these individuals, of course, is responsible for modifications in our joint work or for my errors in interpretation.

Working on the Holocaust imposes special emotional demands on a scholar, and my debt to my husband, children, and mother for their love and understanding is heartfelt and deep. This book is dedicated to my mother, Gertrude Monroe, my first and most enduring moral exemplar.

The Hand of Compassion

________________________________

Stories That Are True

He was about five-foot tall, sturdy, and he had his little cap in his hand and he was turning it. He kept saying—he must have said it about ten times—I am ashamed to be a German.

Even the Russian prisoners of war were put in that ditch. And the bodies fell on top of others. They made the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Russian prisoners of war to dig a ditch a kilometer long and they made them take off their clothes, their shoes, and their jewels. And then they shot them and they fell into the ditch.

And he kept saying, I am ashamed to be a German. I am ashamed!

When I saw that story in the Holocaust Magazine it was like reliving it again! I didn’t tell them. I don’t know where they got it. But I was there when he told Mrs. Fisher, after he came to tell her about her brother dying on the Russian Front. And it was all real.

THE SPEAKER IS MARGOT, one of the German-born rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe interviewed as part of the research for this book. Her words come not from one of our formal interviews but from an ordinary telephone conversation, long after our explicit relationship as subject and interviewer had ended, after we had become friends. I must have been working on the computer when Margot called for I later chanced upon Margot’s words, typed hastily and stored in an unnamed computer file.

I include this story because it reveals a glimpse of the shock and pain Margot still feels about the war, her conflicting emotions and her sense of disconnect with that time. Because this story, like the others in this book, are stories that are true. Stories that reveal ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events that forced them to be their big selves, events that left a legacy many have still neither made sense of nor fully assimilated. Stories that reveal the speakers’ innermost thoughts about themselves and their lives. Stories that are not mine. And therein lies both an ethical dilemma and a remarkable opportunity to gain insight into moral issues that concern us all.

Margot’s story is told in full in chapter 1. Like those of the other rescuers in this book, it suggests the striking extent to which action flows from identity, from our most basic sense of who we are. Margot’s story reveals how her sense of self constrained the choices she made by limiting the particular options she found available, not just morally but cognitively. By listening carefully to Margot, we not only learn that identity constrains moral choice; we also discover the moral and political significance of how we see the world, and particularly how we see ourselves in relation to others. It is not just our identities that are critical. It is also our own shifting and often idiosyncratic views of ourselves in relation to others that determine how we treat people.

Listening to Margot forced me to confront the most basic questions concerning ethics and normative politics, and much of my analysis contrasts the major theories of moral choice with what I discovered about moral action through listening to Margot and other rescuers of Jews. Does religion or reason drive moral choices? Are certain groups of individuals—women, the better educated, or people in certain occupations—more likely to do the right thing? Were Germans more anti-Semitic than other Europeans? What gives one person the moral courage others lack?

Such questions are perhaps obvious ones and I try to address them in this book. But I also encountered other ethical issues that I had not anticipated when I started my research. Is it fair to publish the intimate details of another person’s life, even when that person has given her permission? When bonds of trust—and friendship—are established, what particular obligations does that impose on the researcher to protect someone who is, after all, a human being and not just a subject in a research project? Margot’s case is instructive in this regard.

Shortly after Hitler came to power, Margot left a promising life in Germany and moved to Amsterdam in protest over Nazi policies. When the war began, Margot thus found herself in the unenviable position of being on the record as a non-supporter of the Nazi regime. Worse, once in Holland she and her husband divorced, and Margot was left with two young, part-Jewish children to raise. Despite her precarious position, Margot showed no hesitation in working to hide Jews and in helping the Resistance, even though she was told that if caught, we do not know you. Unfortunately, Margot was caught, and arrested six times. She lost contact with her daughters for a while and, through her Resistance activities, had an affair with the Gestapo commander for Amsterdam, a man she later had killed by the Resistance. Margot spoke freely about all of these wrenching wartime events, including her painful divorce and the separation from her daughters; especially hurtful was a continuing emotional ache from the death of her fiancé, Alfred, who was beaten to death by the Gestapo when he tried to get Margot released from prison, naively believing that Margot was innocent and that the Nazis would listen to reason.

I had sent Margot a copy of the transcribed interviews and asked her to delete anything she felt was too personal before giving permission to have them published. Margot returned the legal form granting permission to publish, but I had the gnawing suspicion that she had not actually read the transcripts.

Was Margot aware of how much of herself she had revealed during our conversations? Had I somehow taken advantage of the friendship we had established? Was I now violating Margot’s trust by publishing information that was so personal, even though the friendship had evolved and the interview material was obtained within the clearly defined context of the research project? I agonized about the tension surrounding scholarship, privacy, and friendship, and mentioned my dilemma to one of Margot’s daughters. Does your mother realize some of the things she had told me? I asked. Are you sure she’s okay with my publishing these interviews?

Margot’s daughter assured me her mother knew what was in the transcripts and that it was all right to publish them. I have taken Margot and her daughter at their word even though I suspect the selfishness peculiar to scholars has swayed my judgment in this instance. I remain conflicted about this and hope the unusual opportunity to share Margot with the reader has justified my decision to publish her personal recollections of this time.

Margot’s story raises many other important issues. One of the most significant concerns the reliability of memory, especially the retrieval of traumatic events so long past. How dependable is memory? How self-serving? Is the past reconstructed to make the speaker look good to herself? To others? To help the speaker make sense of what went before?

All the rescuers I interviewed were certified through the rigorous procedures of Yad Vashem, the Israeli agency established after the war to verify and certify genuine rescuers. Hence, I am confident that the rescuers I interviewed actually did perform the extraordinary deeds that originally brought them to my attention.¹ Since I am a political scientist, not a historian, my primary intellectual interest is in understanding the moral psychology, not in documenting the past. The concern to verify specific events is thus lessened somewhat, although it does not entirely disappear. But we are still left to contemplate the particular nature of memories of searing, traumatic events.²

In Holocaust Testimonies (1991), Lawrence Langer argues that oral testimonies present a far more complex and nuanced aspect of the Holocaust than written work can, precisely because oral testimonies do not contain a central narrative. They amble. They exhibit contradictions and display ambivalence. Oral testimonies, such as Margot’s, thus include multiple stories, portraying a range of experiences that happened to the same person. Perhaps, as Langer argues, their very contradictions do more accurately capture the contradictory aspect of complex reality than any written narrative that follows a central and directed plot line.

In another important regard, however, Margot contradicts one of Langer’s central claims. Langer makes a credible case that the Holocaust represents a plane apart from life as described in contemporary moral theories. This contention is at odds with the basic premise underlying my book. My approach contrasts traditional scholarly wisdom on ethics with an empirical examination of moral exemplars. I ask how ordinary people—people like Margot—respond in situations that require moral courage. When I find that their actions do not correspond to what the literature on moral choice tells us, I conclude that we need to supplement existing moral theories with a theory that can account for the empirical reality of rescue behavior.

For Langer, who analyzed oral testimonies of concentration camp survivors, the Holocaust constitutes an arena in which the normal conceptualizations of the self simply do not hold because victims of the camps were robbed of the agency necessary to make it meaningful to speak of moral choice. They lived in a moral vacuum [b]ecause the moral systems that we are familiar with are built on the premise of individual choice and responsibility for the consequences of that choice (Langer 1991: 125). Traditional moral systems, Langer thus contends, cannot explain the Holocaust because the agent had no control over the results of his action. Langer further argues that the Holocaust often broke the connections to and with the self, leaving a prewar, a wartime, and a postwar person, with little to connect these selves. The integration necessary to return someone to the world of ordinary moral discourse was impossible for camp inmates. Langer constructs a compelling case that it is oral testimonies, not written works, that most effectively capture these contradictions in the face of a bewildering series of events.³

I found some of this to be true of my conversations with Margot. I had written to Margot asking to interview her and had received an invitation to come to her house one day during the summer of 1988. I arrived around 11:00 in the morning and was welcomed by Margot and her husband, Ted. Come in. Come in, and have a little lunch, Margot said, leading me to a table piled high with Dutch cheeses, pâtés, and other delicacies. As we followed Ted into the dining room, Margot whispered to me, Don’t say anything about why you’re here. He doesn’t know what I did during the war.

Totally taken aback by this request, I sat down at the table, noticing that Ted was eyeing me somewhat quizzically, possibly wondering about this strange woman who had just dropped by for lunch.

Well, I said, why don’t you let me tell you a little bit about myself. I then proceeded to babble on about my children, my husband, my home, anything except my work. Poor Ted hardly had a chance to get a word in, let alone ask why I was visiting his wife.

I realized later that Margot may have been testing me, most likely subconsciously, wondering if I would open up with her as I was asking her to do with me. Certainly, Margot was a master at avoiding painful subjects. She would frequently break off our conversations when we got too close to difficult topics. Her favorite gambit was to exclaim, often quite abruptly, I got to walk the dog, and exit mid-sentence.

I also slowly realized that Margot told me things once, twice, even many times in a somewhat cavalier manner before she would go back and relate the complete story or tell me the story in a manner that revealed some of the emotional distress the event still invoked for her. Three such events were particularly touching.

Margot had been raised in great affluence and had married a wealthy Jewish banker. (Whether or not the marriage was arranged was never made clear.) When Margot initially spoke of their divorce, she would laugh and say, Aach! I divorced the bum when I found him coming out of the maid’s room one morning, pulling up his pants. Always the same phrase. Always the casual dismissal of the event. Only after we had known each other a long time did I learn that Margot had tried to commit suicide after this happened, an action distinctly at odds with the cavalier retelling of the story. And only from Margot’s grandson did I learn that this ex-husband had spent nearly fifty years living very close to Margot in Los Angeles and had only recently died.

Margot twice showed me stories she had written and I soon came to recognize Margot’s propensity for touching pain elliptically. (Margot and I shared this tendency, and I wondered if our penchant for cloaking emotions in the literary may have been one reason we became so close.) The first story Margot showed me told of her own incarceration in prison. Margot wrote about the straw that these poor wretches had to sleep on, how they were mistreated by the guards, how one girl died, and how Margot herself ran afoul of the authorities, risking her life by sticking out her tongue at one of the guards. The story ended with an account of one of the Jewish women being taken out to be killed. As she was leaving, the woman turned to Margot and asked, If you get out, find my husband and sons and tell them what happened to me. See that my sons grow into good men, she implored.

When Margot left prison, the first thing she did—after ascertaining that her own daughters were safely hidden in a convent under assumed names—was try to find out what had happened to the woman’s family. The husband and sons were still in prison, but Margot was able to get the husband some food and a message about his wife. The husband wrote Margot, thanking her for the food. He and his sons were being shipped out that night to a concentration camp and he was grateful for news of his wife, even though the news was bad. The letter was all mudstained. It had been sent to Margot by a Dutch railroad worker, who had retrieved it from the sludge in the freight yards after seeing it thrown through the slats in the passing cattle car. I carried that letter with me for years, Margot wrote, until the paper it was written on disintegrated.

What was most touching to me was that the story was told in the third person.⁴ These poor wretches whom Margot describes as sleeping on straw and fighting off the guards were, in truth, Margot and her fellow inmates, not merely some anonymous people. And only at the end of the story, at a point when years have passed, can Margot bear to use the first person. It is only when she tells of carrying the letter until it disintegrated that Margot puts herself into the story as an actual participant.

Margot’s use of the literary to touch and handle pain is also evident in a short story she wrote about her beloved Alfred, an excerpt of which is included in the chapter on Margot (chapter 1).

I tell you something. I wrote about some thing once, when I was not able to write English well. I wanted to write a story, mostly about Alfred. For him. I’ll get the book out. I have only one book and I haven’t made a copy. I called the girl Isabelle. That’s me. But that’s not me. Me is … I didn’t put my name on it. And I thought, What am I going to do? Isabelle is my grandmother, who was born in Missouri. When I wrote it, I used a nom de plume. And that’s Suzanne de Palma.

Margot brought me her book and placed it in my hands.

This is in the Library of Congress. Even so, I have not given it to anybody. But you see here? If you want part of it, you’re welcome to it. Except I don’t know how to make copies of it because it’s in a binding. That’s the way I think…. I’d like you to see it but I can’t give it away. Maybe I’ll find something and I can have it copied for you. Just wait a little bit, then you can use it. Because it’s in the Library of Congress, but if I gave you permission, it’s all right. I have to take my dog out for a little walk now. You look at the book.

Alfred’s story, which Margot wants to show me but can’t bear to part with because that’s me but that’s not me, is reflective of the extent to which Margot’s story contains multiple voices, even though the speaker is the same person. Any attempt to resolve these different voices would, in Langer’s phrase, betray or falsify the experience being described (1991: 139).

This is one reason I have published the interviews with minimal editing. Interviews do contain contradiction. They do reflect confusion. There is uncertainty as the rescuers navigate their way around what Langer aptly calls the moral quicksand of atrocity (1991: 138). This may simply reflect the reality of the war, but it also may reflect something about identity. By both analyzing and publishing the rescuers’ stories in full, I try to walk the fine line between a scholar’s responsibility both to detect and identify basic themes and to present the data in a way that accurately captures the complexity of human beings constructing a moral life.

Like Langer, I also found that something was ruptured for the rescuers during the war. Something was broken or lost that was irretrievable. But it was not their sense of self. Nor did I find the moral vacuum that Langer describes. Was this because the rescuers were able to establish what I call human connection? Was it because the rescuers were visitors to the hell that was the Holocaust? True, they were constrained by their own sense of moral duty and character, by a sense of self that left them no choice but to risk their lives for others. Yet many rescuers also described years of postwar nightmares, some of which involved a feeling of being trapped.⁵ Since all the rescuers spoke of a lack of choice, I began to wonder about these dreams. Were rescuers’ actions a reflection of character, as I have argued previously and will again argue here? Or was it something more sinister, more depressing, as Langer’s work on survivors suggests? I cannot be sure.

I understand Langer’s anger at attempts to build a monument of hope in the rubble of decay (1991: 165), and I am acutely aware that my own moral values make me want to do precisely that, to clench my fist like Sisyphus⁶ and scream that we will not be broken by this outrage. It is possible that my own desires for hope have crept into even my minimal editing of the transcripts, or that the questions I posed have injected my own meaning on something that was not there for the rescuers. I do not believe this is the case. But I recognize the limitations of anyone who was not there in grasping the full meaning of life during war and the Holocaust.

If the rescuers themselves experience difficulties retrieving their memories of this time, can the rest of us—we who did not experience it ourselves—hope to understand what the Holocaust was like? At certain points, Margot seems to suggest we cannot. Oh, honey, she would moan, nobody who has not been there can ever understand what it was like.

But then she would so desperately try to explain it to me. Margot’s story thus forces us to ask if we can ever understand another time, can ever share the reality of another person’s life experience, without being there or undergoing the experience ourselves. Certainly there are limitations to this journey, and our successful completion may depend as much on empathy as on intellect. But I believe we can try. It is incumbent on us to try. Perhaps the rescuers, the border crossers⁷ between everyday morality and the land so lacking in moral compass, constitute the most qualified guides.

I invite you to let the stories in this book, and my thoughts about their interpretations, lead you to your own judgment about these important questions.

1

Margot

You don’t walk away. You don’t walk away from somebody who needs real help.

The wealthy only child of the head of General Motors for Western Europe, Margot trained for the German diplomatic corps before moving to Holland in protest against Hitler’s policies.

Q. Why don’t you just tell me the story of your life, from the beginning.

That’s just what I want to tell you. My father was—I can tell you without bragging—a very wealthy man. He was the head of General Motors for Europe. He also handled imports of food. We had bags of candies, almonds from Paris, stuff like that, you know, wholesale.

We had German citizenship. But Hitler took it all away from everybody who didn’t like him. Hitler didn’t like people who didn’t like him. Later the [Dutch] queen had me come and made me an honorable citizen. Now I am American. I was Dutch. But before that I had German citizenship. I was born in Germany in 1909, on April the third. I was raised in Germany actually but I didn’t speak German. I spoke only French. I had a French governess. The war broke out in 1914, and my mother said, Don’t speak [French] on the street. But I had to go, like a kid does, and say something to a French girl. Then some German kids came and slapped me half to death.

So, I spent all of World War I in Germany. I was a kid, just a little kid, five years old. Nineteen hundred nine I was born and 1914 it started so I didn’t know anything about it. Then I was sent to Geneva to school.

My father was in the import business. He called me in one day. What do you want to be? he asked. Because I have now money, and I can pay for it. But money comes and goes. What you have in your mind and your head will not be taken away from you.

I can hear him like it’s yesterday! That’s my father. [Margot pointed to a large oil painting hanging over her mantel.] I was sent to England to learn English. And it so happened that every morning I went to Pittman’s College. I went down in the ground, on that underground [subway]. I had already a penny in my hand for a paper. Now I liked the rag paper, which was the Daily Mirror. It wasn’t a fine one. It wasn’t the Times. And I sit in that underground and I read the paper. Now, this is something you can tell to your children. I found the thing that was for my life in that paper. A story about William of Burleigh.¹ Burleigh had a son. And the son said, Father, what is diplomacy? Burleigh took his little boy on his knees—I know it as if I read it today!—and said, There was a sheik in Arabia who dreamt that he lost all his teeth. So he had a dervish come to interpret the dream. And the dervish said, It’s very simple. All your sons will die before you." This dervish he had beheaded. Then the sheik had another dervish come and asked him, What does it mean? I dreamt I lost all my teeth.

This dervish said, Go down on your knees, oh high ruler. And thank the almighty Allah that he will give you such long life that you will even so live to see the lives of your sons. To this dervish he gave gold, silver, and jewels. And so Burleigh said, "This, my son, is diplomacy."

After World War II, Margot moved to Los Angeles, where she lived until her death. Here she is pictured with her little dog, who—I came to suspect—Margot would suddenly announce needed a walk whenever our conversations became too painful.

When I came home, back to Germany, my father had at home a little room with a lot of books, a library you know, and a couch. And he always called me when he had something serious. So he called me. Yes, Dad? I was always scared, because there was always something I was afraid of. But my father never struck me or anything. He was wonderful. He said, Did you make up your mind what you want to be? I told you I can pay for everything now, but you never know. You can lose your money. It’s the same old story.

Anyway, Yes, Dad, I said. I want to go into diplomacy. That was the thing of my life!

Next thing I know, I was sent to Italy to learn Italian. I was at the University of Florence. I was in Italy when I was about seventeen years old. I was still young. In Italy, at the big exam, there was a big round table. I can see that stuff now like it was yesterday! There was a big round table, and lots of professors around, for the oral exam. When it was through, one of the professors said, Child, have you ever thought of writing?

No, sir.

You should, you know. And I want to give you advice for your life.

What? I was curious.

He said, "Never, never go for your second thought. When